It’s a tech preview, so be aware that it isn’t production quality yet. We have played with it a bit, so it definitely works. But as it is a tech preview, don’t expect support.

Madde is a command line tool, but the documentation should clarify how to get started and answer the most common questions.

We would like to hear what you think of it though! There is a component in the Developer platform product in Bugzilla called Madde for any bugs that come up. And we’ll be creating a thread on talk also, where you can give feedback. The team that made Madde is very interested in what you think about the tool.

You can fetch Madde from here. There’s also a .deb package in the downloads to provide a nice way to interface the N900 from Madde. It’s also in development, so don’t expect eye-candy yet.

The idea with Madde is to smooth the way for new developers to shift into Maemo.

The idea is that with Madde you can compile your stuff on your own machine without scratchbox, thus taking away the pain of setting scratchbox up in the first place. Not to mention that setup for Madde is simple, just run the installer and read the instructions while everything is put in place.

The toolkit contains the Qt 4.5 libraries by default. So you can work with Qt directly, no additional downloading needed.

For wide install, providing distribution package is indeed a good idea. Not sure about the licensing stuff, but at one point (when it’s ready) it might make sense to have it included directly in distros (like sb2 which I talk about below).

MADDE runs pretty much everywhere. SB2 is still Linux only.
The target audience for MADDE is due to that fact larger and thus it is also aimed to be simpler in use. On the downside you’ll notice that some more complicated things are harder to do on MADDE. For example,I wouldn’t suggest it for kernel development.

Take a look at what MADDE has eaten, you’ll find it pretty open as well.

MADDE is meant for developing of new applications from scratch. It does not support autotools or any such utilities that try to probe some information about build environment.
MADDE is more like a tradiotional cross-compilation environment. It does not try hide from the build process the fact that we are cross-building. Scratchbox[1,2] make build environment looks like a native one.
Kernel development its actually quite simple. You need only cross-compiler and MADDE offers you that.

Yay, a development environment for an open tablet with a restrictive license. Sigh. Why, yet again, does Nokia make things like this closed when doing so doesn’t help Nokia sell more hardware? (Yes, I’ve read the “why the closed packages” doublespeak. Could we at least get a specific *justification* when new closed bits show up?)

Sorry, MADDE is for C and C++.
However you can develop Python anywhere anyway.

I agree that Python is easier to learn than C or C++, but Qt does make the learning experience easier. Check the Qt documentation at http://doc.trolltech.com/4.5/index.html (Qt 4.5 version as in this tech preview of MADDE)

Especially when you use Qt Designer (Included in Qt Creator) for the interface design, Qt becomes quite easy to learn.

I installed it and it looks really great, thank you. I would like to use this in qt-creator so I compiled the qt-creator master git including the QTCREATOR_WITH_MAEMO setting – I get some new settings dialogs but I cannot select the madde toolchain (toolchain selector only shows “GCC” and is disabled). What do I have to do?

Right now I don’t know. MADDE and Qt Creator will play nice together as you can read from the code, but I’m not sure if everything is in place yet for that. I’ll ask the Qt Creator people once I’m closer to the office.

I got it to work! You just have to select a certain qmake from .madde then qt-creator automatically selects the madde toolchain in a new build configuration based on that Qt/Maemo version.
After creating a new run configuration based on a remote device connection (can be defined in qt-creator settings) my small “Hello World” immediatly built and run fine on the device. Yeah!
I will continue to find out debugging and documenting it on a new Wiki page at maemo.org.

Qt 4.6 is still under development and Qt 4.5 is on device (ok some libraries come from the Nokia repositories when they are needed). The idea was to have something that can be used for creating apps that work right now.

I tried to install the mad-developer package on my N900 but it fails because it expects usb-network-modules 0.2 but extra-devels lists only version 0.1. What’s wrong here? Should I use the -f flag to force installation?

You probably could test, as at that point there should be functional
msys environment at the extraction point — with file manager
madde terminal should open when click madde.bat at the extraction
directory… (before canceling installation and losing extracted files)